Name: Tributes paid to Dame Maggie Smith | BBC News
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Well let's return for the next few minutes to that story that has emerged over the last hour or so.

The multi-award-winning actress Dame Maggie Smith has died at the age of 89.

She was known recently for her roles in the Harry Potter films and in the period drama Downton Abbey.

She won countless awards including an Oscar for her performance as the prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Her children released a statement saying she passed away peacefully in hospital this morning.

Despite her profession her family describe her as an intensely private person.

Well before we hear more tributes let me just read out the latest tributes because the Prime Minister has just tweeted in the last few minutes and Sir Keir Starmer saying Dame Maggie Smith introduced us to new worlds with the countless stories she acted over a long career.

She was beloved by so many for her great talent becoming a true national treasure whose work will be cherished for generations to come.

Our thoughts are with her family and her loved ones and there's been a tribute in the last few minutes from BAFTA as well saying they are saddened to hear that Maggie Smith best known for those Harry Potter films and Downton Abbey has died.

She was a legend they say of British stage and screen winning five BAFTAs as well as a BAFTA special award and BAFTA fellowship during a highly acclaimed career.

Well let's speak to the former MP and good friend of Dame Maggie Smith Charles Brandreth who joins me on the programme.

Charles thank you so much for being with us it is a really difficult day for everyone who loved her.

What are your thoughts on a day like today?

Everyone who loved her and admired her and I know your broadcast goes around the world.

What's interesting about Maggie Smith is that she was a global figure.

Theatre is one of our great exports and somebody like Maggie Smith was one of a kind.

It's the end of a golden line that in her case stretches back when she was born in 1934 but her career really began in Oxford where she was brought up at the Oxford Playhouse in 1952 and so it's more than 70 years of being at the top.

Yes five BAFTAs, two Oscars, four Emmys, three Golden Globes, Olivier nominations galore, Tony nominations.

She was acclaimed and people of the modern generation of course think of her in terms of Downton Abbey.

Young people think of her in terms of being in the Harry Potter films.

Somebody as old as me first saw her on stage in the 1950s in a play called The Rehearsal but I first really fell for her as an actress in the early 1960s when she was one of the stars of Sir Laurence Olivier's original company at the National Theatre and she appeared with Olivier in Othello, in The Master Builder, then with her then husband Robert Stevens in Much Ado About Nothing and she was a great classical actress and what was extraordinary about her was the range.

We became friends because she loved and worked with Kenneth Williams, the comic actor.

They could do brilliant impressions of one another and because I knew Kenneth, Maggie who didn't trust everybody felt able to trust me and got on well with me and particularly with my wife so we know her for many many years but from that era right to the modern era she could do everything.

She could do comedy, she could do tragedy and of course she was a great film star.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is one of the wonderful films of our time.

So from that to Lady in the Van, what a career on screen, on stage and what a wonderful person she was.

She was witty, she was waspish at times, she had a really caustic sense of humour and she didn't suffer fools gladly and yet when she came onto the stage she offered you something that was unique.

These great actors and she was one of the greats.

They don't just do what they do very well.

They have a quality about them that you don't get anywhere else.

There's something about their voice, their style, their character that makes them infinitely watchable and that's what Maggie Smith had.

It would take you too long to actually go through both the list of awards and of course all the different films and stage productions she was involved in.

There were so many different roles over so many decades.

It was quite something though to remain at her peak over all of that period or most of that period, wasn't it?

Yes and though she was sort of self-deprecating and pretended sometimes not to be interested in what she was doing, she was I think fiercely ambitious.

She wanted to be the best and she could be very amusing.

I remember almost the last time I was with her, she told me a story about the great Dame Edith Evans who, when she was appearing, far too old for a part, she would stand in the wings and she would say, before she went on in this role, she would say, I'm young, I'm beautiful and my breasts are firm.

And Maggie would say, this is how you have to do it.

And she certainly thought herself into it quite brilliantly.

You touched on it at one point where you talked about her as a comedy actress.

I mean, she was comic genius, wasn't she?

I mean, for Downton Abbey, people tuned in to watch Downton Abbey simply for the Maggie Smith moments and Julian Fellowes wrote them brilliantly.

I think Julian was never quite sure what Maggie Smith thought of him or indeed Downton Abbey.

And she sometimes said some quite sarcastic things.

She kept saying to him over the last few years, please, please write me a death scene.

But the truth is she was brilliant at it and she knew she was brilliant at it.

And that raised eyebrow and that look that she had to deliver those zinging one-liners, only she could do it.

She is unique and consequently irreplaceable.

You talked about what she was like as a person and a friend.

Tell me a little more about that and tell me what she was like with the many, many younger actors that she performed with, what she was like in terms of encouraging them, inspiring them along the way.

She inspired them and I think she encouraged them.

I think also they found her a little bit daunting.

She knew that people didn't always, they were nervous of knocking on her door.

I think the reason she got that reputation for being sometimes a little bit difficult and caustic is she could be caustic, but she was only difficult because she wanted the highest standards.

She expected the best because she gave the best.

For example, a co-star in Downton Hugh Bonneville told me that he loved her, he admired her hugely, but didn't really get to know her.

She was a very private person and her private life mattered to her.

She had two wonderful sons, has two wonderful sons by Robert Stevens.

And then later she married really the sweetheart from before Robert Stevens, someone called Beverly Cross, the playwright, who was the love of her life.

And I think when he died, she wasn't really ever wholly happy again, except in the company of actresses of her vintage, who she loved and admired, people like Judy Dench and Joan Plowright, Eileen Atkins, all of the vintage, all people coming up to around the age of 90 now.

She was at ease with them and she was at ease with fellow actors who are on her level.

She was comfortable with them and with her family, but she was a very private person.

A really brief final thought, Giles, because you mentioned what her family had said about being such a private person.

Did it feel special that she let someone like you in?

She had wonderful stories and she had worked with all the greats.

You know, she appeared in Travels With My Aunt because Catherine Hepburn couldn't.

She'd worked with Laurence Olivier and she was up there in that league.

And if you think of British theatre, it's long history, great actors from Shakespeare's day to our own.

She is there in the top rank and given that British theatre and our film actors are among the most significant people in our country's life and have been for a long time, we have today lost a very serious and significant figure and we should just be grateful for the 70-year career that she gave us and for her nearly 90 years of good and worthwhile creative life.

Well, Giles, we have to leave it there, but a wonderful tribute from you.

So thank you for coming on to the programme, on to BBC News to just give us a flavour, some thoughts and memories of the actress who the world has lost.

That news coming in a little earlier that today Maggie Smith has died at the age of 89.

Let me point you to the live page that's currently running on the BBC website because that has so many more tributes starting from her family, but many, many tributes to the Prime Minister adding his in the last few minutes and a lot of articles written and Daniela Rolfe, whose piece you may have seen a little earlier, she has written a piece there as well.

 So do head to the BBC website for plenty more on that development.

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Tributes paid to Dame Maggie Smith | BBC News

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